A Landmark Decision for Transgender Rights in Europe

A pride parade in Paris in 2016. Gay and transgender activists in Europe have argued that a sterilization requirement of transgender people was an institutionalized violation of human rights.CreditCreditThibault Camus/Associated Press

Affirming the dignity and autonomy of transgender people by rejecting measures that hark back to the horrifying age of eugenics, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that requiring that people be sterilized before their gender can be changed on identification violates the European Convention on Human Rights’ guarantee that “everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.” The April 6 decision, in favor of three French transgender people barred from changing their names and gender on their birth certificates, sets a new legal standard on equal rights for transgender people in the 47 countries of the Council of Europe, the Continent’s leading human rights organization.

Unconscionably, nearly half of these countries still require sterilization for legal recognition of a transgender person’s self-identified gender, according to the organization Transgender Europe. While the court cannot force lawmakers to change national laws, transgender citizens in those countries now have a powerful legal precedent for challenging this cruel requirement in national courts.

While these requirements are often enacted on the grounds that legal gender should match a person’s physical and biological characteristics, they deprive transgender people of their reproductive rights and subject them to surgery they may not want. Many American states have such legal requirements.

Progress is surely — if too slowly — happening. In France, where the court’s ruling is immediately binding, the matter was already settled by legislation last October. The Netherlands, Denmark and Ireland have moved in recent years to end mandatory sterilization, hormonal therapy, and psychiatric and medical evaluations for transgender people. Last month, Sweden went a step further, proposing compensation to those who had been forced to undergo sterilization before Sweden did away with the odious requirement in 2013.

As the Council of Europe stated in 2015: “Legal gender recognition is about ensuring respect for transgender persons’ right to privacy, self-determination, nondiscrimination and dignity.” By ruling against mandatory sterilization as a requirement for transgender people to exercise the fundamental right to legal gender recognition, the European Court of Human Rights has taken an important step toward the day when the state can no longer assert itself as gender gatekeeper, and transgender people’s right to self-determination is fully recognized.